Author(s) from Durham

Abstract

Signatures with an electroweak vector boson and many jets play a crucial role at the Large Hadron
Collider, both in the measurement of Standard-Model parameters and in searches for new physics. Precise
predictions for these multiscale processes are therefore indispensable. We present next-to-leading order
QCD predictions for W=Z þ jets at ffiffi
s p ¼ 13 TeV, including up to five/four jets in the final state. All
production channels are included, and leptonic decays of the vector bosons are considered at the amplitude
level. We assess theoretical uncertainties arising from renormalization- and factorization-scale dependence
by considering fixed-order dynamical scales based on the HT variable as well as on the MiNLO procedure.
We also explore uncertainties associated with different choices of parton-distribution functions. We provide
event samples that can be explored through publicly available n-tuple sets, generated with BLACKHAT in
combination with SHERPA.